Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language understanding (NLU) technology have advanced significantly in the past decade, ushering in the era of the spoken language interface. For example, the “Siri®” system, which allows users to speak a multitude of questions and commands to the “iPhone®” cellular telephone and Google's similar “Google Voice™” service, have gained mass-market acceptance.
While such products are remarkably successful at recognizing generic requests like “set a reminder for Dad's birthday on December 1st” or “what does my calendar look like for today,” they can be foiled by utterances that contain proper names, especially uncommon ones. Commands like “set my destination to Barbagelata Real Estate,” “tell me how to get to Guddu de Karahi,” or “give me the details for Narayanaswamy Harish, DVM”—all of which are reasonable requests, within appropriate contexts—often yield results that are incorrect if not outright comical.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems providing more accurate recognition of proper names.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.